![]() I love this audio version of the Tales, but without an index it can be frustrating to locate a particular tale. This is an audiobook which could transform the way we all think about Chaucer and the power of the written word! ![]() But this version is ideal for all readers, a box of delights waiting to be relished over and over again. The modernisation of course loses some of the verbal energy of Chaucer's text: I hope these readers will one day give us the original middle English version. But all the other tales are read with a similar sense of delight, engagement and appreciation. ![]() It is absolutely central to the way we read "The Canterbury Tales" as a whole. Students of English Literature who have listened to it will never dismiss that tale again as a tedious diversion up a cul de sac. In a better world, Donald Trump would listen to this recording of "Melibee" and we would all be living in a happier place. His extraordinary ability to make scholarship come alive, to matter to us all. What emerges from the whole recording is the remarkable range of Chaucer's reading and his infectious enthusiasm for knowledge and thinking from all traditions, classical and Biblical. They take "Melibee", as it should be taken, absolutely seriously and reveal that it is a major work, perhaps the greatest Christian homily in English, worthy to compare with Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy": which Chaucer translated and which is the cultural source of so much of his thinking, as it was of Shakespeare’s and of most great writers of the Renaissance. ![]() Beautifully clear voices on the whole but above all these readers, unlike many on the lamentably miscast and under-rehearsed Penguin version, seem to have been steeped in Chaucer all their lives and passionately want to share with the Listener what they have long known and enjoyed. What's absolutely wonderful, revelatory, about this recording is the excitement, the deep understanding, the sense of vigour and drama the readers have for every line they read. It's rather like those who love Bach on the strength of the Brandenburg Concertos but have never really got to know the Cantatas where by far his greatest music lies. But without reading, as very few of us ever have, Chaucer's major tales, the very long ones, we have been missing out in a big way. Of course the well-known tales are all comic masterpieces: The Millers and Reeve's, Tales, the Franklin's, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, the Clerk's and the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale are corner stones of English Literature. I wonder how many readers, teachers, academics even, have ever read, let alone enjoyed Chaucer's "Tale of Melibee"? Have sat back and been not just impressed but riveted by "The Knight's Tale"? Have appreciated the scope and wit of "The Monk's Tale"? I've been teaching Chaucer all my life, have never doubted he is the father of the novel, the grandfather of Shakespeare and Dickens and Kafka, but it's only now I've really glimpsed the extraordinary range, the intellectual strength, the remarkably inclusive humanity of his vision. It is no exaggeration to say that it could transform the way all of us enjoy and understand, not just the nature of the novel, but the relative standing of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens, Chaucer and just about any author you love and admire. A Magnificent, Revelatory Achievement! If there were just one audiobook in your library, this should be it.
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